The line you draw between Bukowski's defiance and the Zen koan at the end is where this gets interesting.
Bukowski says: make death work hard to take you.
The koan says: after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
Same actions. Different relationship to the actions.
One fights from a dualistic model. The other has dropped the fight because the duality stopped making sense.
Your piece names this precisely. The kleshas (what Buddhism calls the mental afflictions you list: pride, anger, greed, fear) don't arise from circumstances. They arise from the conceptual frame we've laid over circumstances.
And the part about "each of our thoughts arise dependently" is 2,500 years old. Pratityasamutpada, dependent origination. No thought is self-generated. Each one arises in relation to what preceded it, what the body is doing, what the environment feeds.
The question you raise at the end is the one that never gets easier: can you catch the chain mid-movement?
How often do you manage to watch the whole process unfold, rather than just noticing the conclusion afterward?
This is the nature of our conditioning. Some choices are made without us knowing. Awareness means we take back control of/accept some of these choices. I am still very far from that place.
The line you draw between Bukowski's defiance and the Zen koan at the end is where this gets interesting.
Bukowski says: make death work hard to take you.
The koan says: after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
Same actions. Different relationship to the actions.
One fights from a dualistic model. The other has dropped the fight because the duality stopped making sense.
Your piece names this precisely. The kleshas (what Buddhism calls the mental afflictions you list: pride, anger, greed, fear) don't arise from circumstances. They arise from the conceptual frame we've laid over circumstances.
And the part about "each of our thoughts arise dependently" is 2,500 years old. Pratityasamutpada, dependent origination. No thought is self-generated. Each one arises in relation to what preceded it, what the body is doing, what the environment feeds.
The question you raise at the end is the one that never gets easier: can you catch the chain mid-movement?
How often do you manage to watch the whole process unfold, rather than just noticing the conclusion afterward?
This is the nature of our conditioning. Some choices are made without us knowing. Awareness means we take back control of/accept some of these choices. I am still very far from that place.